With the release of 4.1 on the horizon, and initiatives such as Krush days, recent call for help with documentation, and the perennial need for localisation it is very useful for end users to be able to easily get their hands on up-to-date builds of KDE4, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. As was the case with the run up to KDE4.0, KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

For the uninitiated, KDE4Daily aims to accomplish this goal using Qemu virtualisation technology (although with KDE4Daily 4.0, people kindly stepped up to provide a VirtualBox/ VMWare equivalent). A self-contained Qemu image with a Kubuntu 8.04 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules (all at r810996, initially) is provided, along with an updater system inside the VM itself. The updater downloads and installs binary updates provided by me to the full set of modules; these tend to be roughly 20-50MB each (although they will occasionally be larger), take a few minutes to apply, and will hopefully be pushed out daily - hence the name ;). "Bridge" updates will hopefully condense a week or so's worth of updates into one more compact version, so you can update at your own pace without being hit with a massive bandwidth bill :)

Because Qemu is distro-agnostic, you do not need to worry about distros or libraries or dependencies or suchlike; in fact, you can even test out KDE 4 while running Windows! The downside is that eye-candy such as KWin's new Composite-based effects will not be testable as Qemu does not support hardware graphics acceleration, and everything will generally feel a lot more sluggish than is the case with a native install.

KDE4Daily comes with its own backtrace-generation system so hopefully devs can be assured of having useful backtraces in any crash bugs you file, courtesy of DrKonqui. Do note that this system is currently rather slow and resource-intensive, although there are plans to improve it during the run of KDE4Daily 4.1. If you do somehow manage to crash a KDE app, please be patient while the valuable backtrace is created!

An extensive FAQ is provided at the KDE4Daily homepage, above; please feel free to ask any further questions in the Dot comments section. Also, note that KDE4Daily has not yet had any real testers apart from myself, so please be prepared for "teething trouble" such as botched upgrades and bandwidth issues! Enjoy, and remember that the more people test, the better KDE 4.1 will be. It's not all work, though; if you just want to try out recent deliciousness such as the KRunner and Marble, then that's fine, too!

My very first blog entry is a brief analysis of the last KDE4Daily run.

An update to r812045 is already queued up and tested, and the next is on its way. After a while, human decisions will be removed from the upload process, and my faithful workhorse will operate on a "If it compiles - ship it!" basis, so be warned ;) If you get a dud update, then just wait around for the next one - KDE4Daily should be robust enough to deal with failures like this.

Some future plans:

- Implement a "mini-Dashboard" ( a small, KDE4Daily specific version of this:

) that tells you what the KDE4Daily preparer is doing (sitting idle; updating SVN; compiling; processing debug info) and whether any error occurred in the last batch. This is mainly for my use as I have a full-time job this time around, but others might find it helpful :)

- Allow a full dev environment to be created inside KDE4Daily by running a script. This will involve grabbing all external dependencies, checking out specific SVN modules (using "snapshots" so as to ease the strain on KDE's SVN servers) and updating them to current, and building. I would have done this last time (and several people asked me for it) but the crazy partitioning scheme meant there wouldn't have been room. So soon the barrier to hacking on KDE will be lower than ever!

Incidentally, if anyone wants to convert to VirtualBox and upload it somewhere, please do - I'd do it myself, but it takes me hours and hours to upload images, and I'm already seeding the Qemu version :/

Thanks SSJ, kde4daily makes testing KDE trunk easy and fun! (Plus, now I can resist learning to compile from SVN until summer, when I actually have time. Aaron's blog has been getting me so excited that I was ready to risk screwing up my computer during finals week, lol.)

hm, just wondering...what should be the first port-of-call when reporting bugs? To you or the kde bugtracker?

I've already run into one bug...and one that seems unlikely to have been missed by the developers. Nothing has crashed though so there's no backtrace available...but the thing is, whenever I add a plasmoid or a new panel - it isn't saved between sessions and neither are programs left running on shutdown (at least not akregator or kontact). I can, however, create directories and files in /home that are saved and retained as they should (including comments and tags) so I don't think it's as basic as insufficient rights to modify files - and the files I've taken a further look at has sufficient rights at that.

Note though that I have converted the qemu image to a vbox one, although I doubt that is the cause of the problem.

The Plasma thing has hit me a few times, and it seems that there is a plasmaappletsrc (can't remember the exact file name at the moment) but no plasmarc. I don't know enough about the internal workings of Plasma to know if this is the cause of it, but it does seem strange at least.

The KDE4 install isn't provided as .debs, but there is in principle no reason that I can see why users of *buntu Hardy couldn't run KDE4Daily natively. I'll investigate this more when I have a chance, but I'll try and post an "anatomy of KDE4Daily" so that people can see how it's put together starting with a blank server install - a few people have asked for installable/ LiveCD versions, and this will hopefully enable them to easily create them.

> I'll investigate this more when I have a chance
That's good to hear.
> but I'll try and post an "anatomy of KDE4Daily" so that people can see how it's put together starting with a blank server install - a few people have asked for installable/ LiveCD versions, and this will hopefully enable them to easily create them.
That's very good to here.

I did some initial tests, 256mb for qemu mem is waaaay to slow for kde. I felt with 1gb its slow, but bearable. I can imagine how slow its going to be when generating a backtrace.

I am not sure though why it is so slow, I have had vmware images (kubuntu) run on vmware server with 512mb and its quite responsive.

Plasma theme bug?
downloaded themes with khotnewstuff and installed some of those that were voted great in the plasma theme contest? and after installing, selecting them as "the" theme, logged back in and the whole desktop is empty (no panel, cashew, nothing)

I noticed with mine that nepomukservices(?) chewed up 100% of the CPU for several minutes. Have you tried running "top" in a terminal (from within KDE4Daily) to see if any processes are slowing everything down?

Well I've got it running in a virtualbox. I am now updating it and will then try to get a torrent out. I will have some seeding problems up until monday though, so best thing will be to get it tonight.

I had the same problems (with 1.5.6) . Actually i only now found a workaround. "sudo su" to root password is kde4daily
Then rmmod pcnet32 (for the default virtualbox device network module). modprobe pcnet32.
when you now look at dmesg you'll see something like "found 1 device. renamed it to eth5".